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Boston prayer service a rousing display of grace and toughness

People listen as President Barack Obama speaks at an interfaith prayer service for victims of the Boston Marathon attack at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston on Thursday.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

BOSTON — The black pastor, grinning as he yelled into his cell, was standing on Washington Street a few blocks from the historic Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the mother ship of this city’s large Roman Catholic diocese.

“You shoulda seen it!” he cried with delight.

“They were shouting and whooping — in a Roman Catholic cathedral!”

Indeed, oh my yes, they were.

In this town, they don’t settle for a mere “healing” service, but kick a few metaphorical asses around the metaphorical block, invite in speakers they know will stir their hearts and then interrupt the hell out of them with hoots and standing ovations, sing a few sturdy songs, have a really good cry, borrow some tissue from the guy beside them, and leave feeling a whole lot better.

This was the “Healing Our City” interfaith service held Thursday in the city’s south end. Praise the Lord, it did not live up to its sappy billing.

It probably was unlike any other service that gracious old church has ever hosted.

Certainly the atmosphere inside, where 2,000-plus people crowded into the soaring space, was more akin to that at a Red Sox game — perhaps especially (because of the waterworks) during the team’s 86-year-long losing streak, which as the comedian Stephen Colbert pointed out one recent night on his show, if that didn’t break Boston’s spirit, nothing would.

Organized remembrances, healing services and the like always have the potential to become adult versions of the dreadful teddy bear memorial, but this was nothing of the sort, rather a rousing display of unembittered grace and toughness.

As former congresswoman Jane Harman — a security expert and now the boss of the Woodrow Wilson centre, a policy and research institute — bravely told CNN on the day of the marathon bombing, “I know this may be hard to hear, but one of the things we have to show in this country is resilience. … We have to show we’re not terrorized by these things.”

And four days in, time enough to come to a verdict, Harman told Postmedia in a telephone interview from her Washington office, she thinks Americans have generally responded toughly, if not outright magnificently, and here she referenced U.S. President Barack Obama’s “reflection,” during which he was several times interrupted by prolonged applause and standing ovations complete with spontaneous shouts of agreement.

If the president was smarting from the Senate’s stunning defeat of his bipartisan and entirely modest gun-control bill earlier this week, it didn’t show.

He hit it out of the park in a speech that touched upon the “Boston diaspora,” as he called the city’s splendid schools and the huge numbers of students they draw from across the country and indeed the planet (the president is one such himself, having attended Harvard Law School), and repeatedly used the marathon as a metaphor for life.

“That’s what you reminded us,” he told the assembled. “To push on. To persevere. To not grow weary. To not get faint. Even when we hurt. Even when our heart aches. We summon the strength that maybe we didn’t know we had, and we carry on.

“We finish the race,” he said, and by now the crowd was on its feet again. “We finish the race!

“And we do that because we know that somewhere around the bend a stranger has a cup of water. Around the bend, somebody is there to boost our spirits …” that sense of community, that love for one another, Obama said, is what the bombers, “those small, stunted individuals,” don’t understand.

“That’s why a bomb can’t beat us,” he said.

Harman loved that line. She’s even considering going to the marathon next year herself, if only as a spectator (she has run the Washington Marine Corps before).

“We have to be out in force,” she said, demonstrate that “we don’t get terrorized beyond the huge personal wounds of the families” of the dead and injured. She applauded the fact that Congress didn’t close, as it did after the 9/11 attacks.

Boston, she said, has provided “maybe … the first really good example of a resilient America.” Resilience has even been part of post-9/11 planning, Harman said, who resigned from Congress just two years ago. She mentioned in particular the Safe Port Act, which builds in the mandated quick reopening of ports, post attacks.

“Congress tried to legislate resilience,” she said, “but resilience is also a state of mind.”

She said that while the marathon bombings may have some lessons — for instance, she suspects the bombers had a wary eye on the last run the bomb-sniffing dogs made near the finish line, and moved in after that — but that the hard truth is that there’s no such animal as 100 per cent security, only good risk management.

“Very clever, very evil people found a weakness,” she said, “and attacked us asymmetrically.”

What Harman has noticed — “No recriminations of anybody, by anybody,” even in the toxic U.S. capital — was also true of the service.

It was properly ecumenical, with all the world’s major religions mercifully represented by gifted speakers and in the audience turbans, head scarves and ball caps, and as diverse as America itself.

One of the reflections was given by Nasser Wedaddy, a Muslim who is also the civil rights outreach director of the American Islamic Congress.

Wedaddy, originally from the West African nation of Mauritania, lived as a boy with his family near Damascus, Syria. One day, on his way home from school, he saw a car bomb explode, with all its attendant terror and carnage. Monday brought that back for him, he said.

But a week earlier, Wedaddy took part in another ceremony, at historic Faneuil Hall, with 400 other people from 77 different countries.

He was taking the oath of citizenship, of course. He swore to defend the U.S. Constitution and its laws.

On a glorious day — as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who conceived the service, said, what Boston wants is “accountability without vengeance” — the newest American in the crowd was, as grateful and glad as any other.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile